Film Faces

Anna Paquin Interview
By E.C. Gladstone

EG:  What made you want to keep acting?

AP: Well, it was always good.  You know, you go to work every day, and everyone includes you, you’re not like the youngest child who is too young to go play with other kids kind of thing.  You get to actually be part of everything and you are doing completely different stuff than you would normally do.  I mean I’m having completely different sort of experiences when I was really little, like all the funny old dresses I was wearing in The Piano.  I thought that was great, you know, like playing dress up all day long, you know.  And, then as I got a little bit older, it was like ‘I really like this, this is what I want to do.’  It was sometime around Hurlyburly. I’d work on like one thing a year, and there was a little while where nothing was releasing. I wasn’t working all the time because I wasn’t really wanting to. It wasn’t really something that was motivated by me it was just like, I’d read something and be like, ‘Oh ok I want to do this.’ There wasn’t someone making me do stuff, when Anna wanted to work Anna worked, and when Anna wanted to stay home and be with her friends, did just that.  And then started to get really get into what I was doing and wanting to do it all the time, so I did.

EG: It wasn’t until Hurlyburly you got into it as a career?

AP: I mean until then, I was more oblivious and I still didn’t really get the whole thing. Actually, Walk on the Moon I was like, 14, 15 and that’s when you kind of start developing real interests, and really having your own kind of passions and things that you want to really do.  And I was like wow, ‘there is this thing I get to do…’

EG: So, you never felt any pressure after winning the Oscar?

AP: I mean either you can be like ‘OK well, how am I ever supposed to live up to that blah blah blah pressure?’ or you can just be like, ‘OK well, that was really great, thank you very much.’  I’m just going to go about my business now, and now see if I can figure out what I am actually doing. You kind of have to pretend, ‘OK that was good but basically that didn’t happen.’ Because I didn’t even know what the Oscar’s were. And everyone’s like ‘ooh blah blah blah,’ like this big thing, and I was like, ‘OK, um so what does that mean, what do I have to do? Am I supposed to do something different now?  Am I supposed to be someone else?’ It didn’t really affect me in any way because, it was like first time around. It was not like I ever even thought about it so, it was just like OK. Why not?

FF

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